h
required to be solved before Venice and the Venetians could, with any
justice, be considered a place and a people. First, the various and
largely hostile populations who had taken refuge in the lagoon had to be
reconciled to each other; and secondly, they had to be reconciled to
their new home, to be identified with it and made one with it.

The lagoon achieved both reconciliations; the isolation of its waters,
their strangeness, gradually created the feeling of unity, of family
connection, among the diverse and hostile components of the population,
till a fusion took place between the original and the immigrant
inhabitants, and between the people and their home, and Venice and the
Venetians emerge upon the history of the world as an individual and
full-grown race. But this reconciliation and identification were not
accomplished at once. They cost many years of struggle and of danger.
The unification of Venice is the history of a series of compromises, an
historical example of the great law of selection and survival.

THE DECLINE AMID SPLENDOR[53]

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE

Venice the beautiful city ended, pagan-like, as did its sisters the
Greek republics, through nonchalance and voluptuousness. We find,
indeed, from time to time, a Francis Morosini, who like Aratus and
Philopoemen, renews the heroism and victories of ancient days; but,
after the seventeenth century, its bright career is over. The city,
municipal and circumscribed, is found to be weak, like Athens and
Corinth, against powerful military neighbors who either neglect or
tolerate it; the French and the Germans violate its neutrality with
impunity; it subsists and that is all, and it pretends to do no more.
Its nobles care only to amuse themselves; war and politics with them
recede in the background; she becomes gallant and worldly....

But the evening of this fallen city is as mellow and as brilliant as a
Venetian sunset. With the absence of care gaiety prevails. One
encounters nothing but public and private fetes in the memoirs of their
writers and in the pictures of their painters. At one time it is a
pompous banquet in a superb saloon festooned with gold, with tall
lustrous windows and pale crimson curtains, the doge in his simarre
dining with the magistrates in purple robes, and masked guests gliding
over the floor; nothing is more elegant than the exquisite aristocracy
of their small feet, their slender necks and their jaunty little